Touch of Frost by Jennifer Estep Read Free Book Online Page B

them to prevent people from stealing the stuff inside. But I always wondered how much some of the items would go for on eBay, if they were real. Probably enough to tempt even Jasmine Ashton, the richest girl at Mythos, into walking off with them in her designer purse.
    Ten minutes later, I put away the last book, grabbed the cart, and tried to steer it back to the checkout counter. But, of course, the metal contraption had a life of its own and zoomed toward yet another case. I managed to stop the cart just before it slammed into the glass.
    “Stupid wheel,” I muttered.
    I walked around the cart and was trying to shove it back from the other side when a wink of silver caught my eye. Curious, I looked down into the case that I was standing next to.
    A sword lay inside it, one of hundreds in the library. My eyes skimmed over the glass, looking for the plaque that would tell me whose sword it was and what she’d done with it that was so freaking special. But there wasn’t a plaque on the case. No silver plate on the outside, no little white card on the inside, nothing. Weird. Every other case that I’d seen had had some sort of ID on or in it. Maybe Nickamedes had forgotten about this one, since it was way back here in the stacks in no-man’s-land.
    I should have shoved the cart into the aisle, gone back to the checkout counter, and packed up my messenger bag so I could leave the very second that Nickamedes came back. But for some reason, I found myself stopping and looking down at the sword once more.
    It was a simple enough sword—a long blade made out of a dull silver metal with a hilt that was just a little bit bigger than my hand. A small weapon, compared to some of the enormous crowbars that I’d seen in the library.
    Still, something about the shape of the sword seemed . . . familiar to me. Like I’d seen it before. Maybe there had been an illustration of it in my myth-history book. Maybe some bad guy had used it in the Chaos War, if it had ever even really taken place. I snorted. Probably not.
    I cocked my head to the side, trying to figure out why the sword was so interesting. And I realized that the hilt almost looked like . . . a face. Like half of a man’s face had somehow been inlaid into the metal. There was a slash of a mouth, a groove of a nose, the curve of an ear, even a round bulge that looked like an eye. Weird. But it wasn’t ugly. It looked almost . . . alive.
    There were some words on it, too. I could just see them glinting on the blade right above the hilt, like they’d been carved into the metal there. I squinted, but I couldn’t quite make out what they were. V-i-c—Vic something, I thought, leaning close enough to leave a nose print on the smooth glass—
    CRASH!
    Startled by the sudden noise, I jumped back and pressed myself against the bookshelf. Eyes wide, heart in my throat, blood pounding in my ears. What the hell was that?
    I didn’t consider myself to be a scaredy-cat, and I certainly wasn’t some wimpy girly-girl who was afraid of her own shadow. But my mom had been a police detective. She’d told me lots of horror stories about people getting mugged and worse. And the Library of Antiquities wasn’t exactly as warm and friendly as a park on a summer day. Nothing was at Mythos.
    Now that I thought about it, I hadn’t heard anything while I’d been shelving books. No sounds, no rustles of clothes, nothing to indicate there was anyone left but me in the entire library—
    Something cold and hard dug into my palm. I looked down and found that I’d wrapped my hand around the glass case, my fingers curled around the metal clasp, a second away from opening it and grabbing the weapon inside.
    But the really strange thing was that the sword was staring at me.
    The cover on the bulge on the hilt had slid up, revealing a pale eye that regarded me with a cold, steady stare. It was an odd color, too, not quite purple and not quite gray either—
    Then, my brain kicked in and reminded me